Let's Talk About Monk "Problems"

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Q7. The new Monk skill “Riddle of Fire” is a very powerful buff, but because the effect increases the GCD, it is very stressful to play. Monk had a feeling of speedy combat, so if adjustments are possible, please implement them.

A7. We were considering a Greased Lightning IV, but felt it would become too fast and widen the gap between player DPS even further. We believe it may be difficult to understand the weaponskill recast time increase without trying it out in Savage.
It may be easier to understand during longer fights.

If there are requests despite this, we will consider them. For the moment, things are somewhat complete, so we would like to ask for feedback after players have tried Savage.

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Let’s break it down and really talk about how Riddle of Fire and rotation adjustments affect MNK rather than complain that the job, “feels to slow,” or, “isn’t fitting the player’s preconceived notion of the function of the job.”

In the scenario mentioned in the Live Letter, if MNK was given GL4, (“+10% damage, -5% weaponskill cast and recast time, spell cast and recast time[why is this even in the tooltip], and auto-attack delay), MNK would probably see even more nerfs than we got at Stormblood launch. This includes one of our new prime functions, Deep Meditation, based on Critical Hit meanwhile Critical Hit Rate got nerfed at launch as well. Additionally, any adjustments of reducing Riddle of Fire's "penalty" will probably result in a trade-off reduction elsewhere.

Let’s get into Riddle of Fire math, although it’s pretty easy to eyeball it by counting GCDs during the use of Riddle of Fire or Bloodbath (same duration as RoF) for comparison. For references, the values below are obtained with Skill Speed at 1243 and a GCD used immediately in tandem with the use of Riddle of Fire. Numbers will be in seconds unless otherwise noted. Base GCD recast is 2.37, one stack of Greased Lightning is 2.25, two stacks of GL is 2.13, and three stacks of GL is 2.01. With Riddle of Fire up, base is 2.72, one GL is 2.58, two GL is 2.45, and three GL is 2.31.

During Riddle of Fire’s duration and using an GCD immediately after using RoF, you can fit nine GCDs in at GL3, and equates to roughly 18.48. Without Riddle of Fire and at GL3 in twenty seconds, you can do ten GCDs, maaaybe 11 with enough Skill Speed and/or lower latency), but it equates to roughly 18.09.

Long story short: the uproar over Riddle of Fire is basically looking a gift horse in the mouth. Quite frankly, MNK still compares fairly well and has an increase in raid utility now, so there's really no need to adjust(nerf) Riddle of Fire.

Real-talk though:
Earth’s Reply has extremely limited usefulness for refreshing Greased Lightning and the skill in the benchmark was almost implied to be something that gave us GL3 as it was seen being followed-up by a Tornado Kick. Seriously, if you don’t time your last hit to refresh GL right before a transition, a lot of the transitions still take nearly ten seconds or more before you take damage. I’m not really sure of a good suggestion for adjusting this outside of making Riddle of Earth refresh GL upon use.

Brotherhood has zero usefulness in solo content, unless you’re using your chocobo and giving it 5% Physical Damage? And even in 4-man content, very low returns on average as compared to 8-man content where you will almost always get at least five chakra. If we had to do a trade-off for Riddle of Fire adjustments, this is where I would do it by reducing both the damage increase and penalty on Riddle of Fire by 5%, and allowing Brotherhood to affect the casting MNK.

I’m not particularly thrilled with Tackle Mastery either. The utility is only useful is very limited situations, but having to change forms and use Shoulder Tackle quickly while say, an enemy or two is casting makes the usefulness difficult to utilize and be affective because we would need to be either knocking an enemy back or stunning two at the same time.

I would have much rather seen an implementation along the same lines with Mantra and the different Fists and could have potentially negated Brotherhood being a standalone skill and being something else useful. So say Fists of Fire Mantra would be the buff we get from Brotherhood. Fists of Earth could be like, 3~5% defense for the party, and Fists of Wind could be the regular healing potency.

Speaking of Fists of Wind, this skill really needs to evolve since the Sprint adjustment makes it useless in basically every situation outside of running from point A to point B in places you can’t use your mount or Sprint is down. I think it would be interesting to see this skill change into say, Fists of the Storm and give a buff to Critical Hit.

That’s my two cents on the current state of MNK.

Addition: Riddle of Earth giving 10% additional damage reduction with Fists of Earth is kind of nice, but in most situations, it's probably /not/ going to make or break livability. As well as considering the fact that this skill is tied with that which refreshes Greased Lightning, I'd personally be more reluctant to use it for defense than to save it for a situation where I could potentially save GL3.

I think they missed out on a lot of opportunities with MNK. The stuff you said about the fists would have been interesting to see. And Fists of the Storm? With a name like that, I'm on board.

Lets be fair... The biggest problem MNK has will have to wait another 2 years to possibly fix. Lack of another blunt weapon user. How much of a buff would a blunt weapon tank who cant apply its own debuff give to monk?

Riddle of Fire isn't a bad skill, but it is a skill that doesn't suit a Monk. It feels more like something a Warrior, Dark Knight, or Samurai might have instead. It is just incredibly slow and does very little. I'd rather have the skill just add like a flat amount of potency to all attacks for the duration instead. The skills introduced this expansion, along with the others like Brotherhood and Tackle Mastery, just seems completely contradictory and do very little to actually support Monks. Monks were all about building up attack speed with Greased Lightning, but Tornado Kick completely removes all three stacks for an attack that just isn't worth it. Forbidden Chakra just doesn't work either as it is too dependent on luck to get chakras. I'd rather have it charge one every time we get a stack of Greased Lightning because then it would at least be gained reliably.The chakras are gained by critical hit chance and are too luck dependent even with Brotherhood activated. Riddle of Fire also goes against building speed.

Right now, I feel that Samurai is what Monk should have been. Samurais are more able to chain together their combos to grant attack speed and damage bonuses. They can ignore the directional requirements that Monks have. Their skills are far less conditional and their high damage skills are not tied to the buffs they get.

Well, the theme they seem to be pushing this expansion is, "party synergy." We can draw that from Yoshi-Ps comments about DRG as well as all of the skills others classes got that contribute to the party in some way or another. Brotherhood in theory is good, but not affecting the MNK makes it a useless skill outside playing with others and I feel like the Lv70 MNK skill shouldn't be solely for grouped content.

Tornado Kick is 100% more viable now when you line-up Riddle of Fire and Internal Release and then immediately re-apply a stack of Greased Lightning afterwards.

Deep Meditation is a good trait building on the Chakra system, but when I found out only weaponskills had the potential to give Chakras and not abilities, (Like Steel Peak, Elixir Field), I found it be a little more lacking. But, it does give MNK a chance to actually build Chakra while in combat, rather than in transitions or having to move away from the enemy for whatever reason.

I think it's a bit condescending that they had a few answers that told us to basically wait until Savage to see how a skill works as if we didn't have hands-on with the skill already, and that coming at the same time where they nerfed potency on NIN because they for a second time found players outputting more DPS than they had internally tested for. I'm not sure that running savage on monk is going to fix the issue people have with it anyway, which is less about the potency / DPS and more about how it feels.

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Originally Posted by NovaLevossida

I think it's a bit condescending that they had a few answers that told us to basically wait until Savage to see how a skill works as if we didn't have hands-on with the skill already, and that coming at the same time where they nerfed potency on NIN because they for a second time found players outputting more DPS than they had internally tested for. I'm not sure that running savage on monk is going to fix the issue people have with it anyway, which is less about the potency / DPS and more about how it feels.

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Honestly, having a problem with Riddle of Fire because how it feels is pretty irrational. It's still 30% damage, 20% over the Blood for Blood we had before. It's kind of foolish to think that we can't figuratively take a step backwards in order to take a step forward, especially since in the quote at the top of the thread, if we went any faster at this point, it'd be too fast and broken compared to other DPS jobs.

Fist spells are boring.

Riddle of Earth is questionable use
Riddle of Wind not interacting with Tornado kick is a missed opportunity

Deep Meditation should interact with Direct Hits as well.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

Honestly, having a problem with Riddle of Fire because how it feels is pretty irrational. It's still 30% damage, 20% over the Blood for Blood we had before. It's kind of foolish to think that we can't figuratively take a step backwards in order to take a step forward, especially since in the quote at the top of the thread, if we went any faster at this point, it'd be too fast and broken compared to other DPS jobs.

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It's quite not irrational, especially since I already pointed out that DPS isn't the problem. It's the same thing with BRD and 3.0. Is it irrational to say that you don't like a job because of how they changed how it feels? I think there was enough outcry against bow wizards from people who played BRD for its mobility from 2.55x into 3.0 to say how a job feels is a big part of why people like it.

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Originally Posted by NovaLevossida

It's quite not irrational, especially since I already pointed out that DPS isn't the problem. It's the same thing with BRD and 3.0. Is it irrational to say that you don't like a job because of how they changed how it feels? I think there was enough outcry against bow wizards from people who played BRD for its mobility from 2.55x into 3.0 to say how a job feels is a big part of why people like it.

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You're talking about a complete change of how the job functions, not just a slowdown of .30seconds per GCD for 20 seconds. MNK can still utilize the same potential it's had since launch aside from the Riddle of Fire exception.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

You're talking about a complete change of how the job functions, not just a slowdown of .30seconds per GCD for 20 seconds. MNK can still utilize the same potential it's had since launch aside from the Riddle of Fire exception.

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Or, in short, how the job feels to play.

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Originally Posted by NovaLevossida

It's quite not irrational, especially since I already pointed out that DPS isn't the problem. It's the same thing with BRD and 3.0. Is it irrational to say that you don't like a job because of how they changed how it feels? I think there was enough outcry against bow wizards from people who played BRD for its mobility from 2.55x into 3.0 to say how a job feels is a big part of why people like it.

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You can say that you don't like the job or the specific skill. You cannot say, however, that MNK "has problems" because it feels weird having a slower gcd for a few seconds. They're not going to change RoF because some people said they prefer a fast mnk. Just like they didn't change brd in 3.x when people complained about bowmage. And the change there was way more drastic.

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Originally Posted by NovaLevossida

Or, in short, how the job feels to play.

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How the job is played does not equate to how the job feels to play. You basically had to keep that ability up on BRD full-time. Here, we've been told, MNK is basically at the speed cap we want for DPS jobs and can't go any further. So for 20 seconds, we punch slightly faster than base GCD without GL. It is not require full-time to reach optimal potential for the job.